


The Closet

by kaiface



Category: Original Work
Genre: Childhood Memories, Dimension Travel, Freeform, Horror, Night Terrors, Nightmares, Original Fiction, Psychological Horror, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-06
Packaged: 2018-03-16 15:41:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3493775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaiface/pseuds/kaiface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes our biggest childhood fears come back to haunt us as adults.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Closet

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for this came to me while I was supposed to be working on something else.
> 
> That's all I really have to say.

As a child, I dreamed of adventure.

Most children do, in fact; it's in a child's nature to dream, even if those dreams are some of the time rather ordinary or plain. My dreams were not plain, of course, but extravagant, beautiful, and often frightening.

For instance, I would often build a fort in the corner of my room with blankets and chairs and pretend I was a very brave adventurer or mighty hero, hiding out from the imaginary enemies or monsters that may be after me. I got to be very good at pretending, so good that after a while my parents began to scold me for bringing my adventures to the dinner table.

Certainly there is a point when parents should begin to worry, however in my case, their worries spurred me only further into my dream world. The more they scolded me, the more I pretended that I was a lost prince from another world, and that I had been kidnapped when I was very young and given to these people who weren't my parents. I became so invested in this dream world that I would cry myself to sleep at night and wake from nightmares about the things that had stolen me away from my home.

I began to avoid my closet.

All of my nightmares were involving my closet. In most of them, the creatures that had taken me from my world and brought me into this one were coming from within my closet to finish the job. They had dropped me here accidentally and it had taken them time to find me, but they did. They found me, and now they would devour me. Many nights I woke myself up with my screaming and thrashing at the imaginary pain that felt so real. My fake parents would come in to make sure I was okay, to hug me and kiss my forehead and tuck me back in. I understood then that it wasn't their fault, the creatures had stopped in this world by mistake, got me mixed up with the couple's real child. I dread to think what happened to that other child, but these people had accepted me as their own, and despite my resentment toward them I began to take some comfort in the idea that they would at least protect me from the creatures that threatened to send me to my final resting place.

After a few years, the nightmares calmed down to nothing, but I continued to avoid closets because of the insinuation of my childhood dreams. Someday, from the darkest corner of a closet where you can't quite see or reach, something will reach through in search of me.

Eventually I got over my delusion that I was royalty from a parallel dimension and that some alien creatures had kidnapped me with the intention of eating me, but had gotten me mixed up with a human child at an impromptu stop in this dimension. The whole thing was ridiculous really, because that sort of thing doesn't happen. Sure, you hear about changelings and the like, but those stories are really about parents whom – while grieving the disappearance of their child – developed a psychological disorder that caused them to not recognize their child when they were safely returned.

As I grew older I found that most strange occurrences like these could be explained away with the correct application of psychology and social sciences. When I graduated high school, I got my acceptance to a university in another state, and I moved away from my parents for the first time.

Living on my own wasn't an option, so I got a roommate – a friend I had met online years before who had been looking to move away from his parents as well – named Nick. We got an apartment off campus together, he got a job working at the nearest video game store, and I got a grant that allowed me to get paid for going to school for Child Psychology. My goal was to get my degree and certification so that I could start up a practice that would provide affordable mental health care for children. Years of study had told me that my childhood trauma could have been treated or prevented if my parents could have afforded to get me the proper care, never mind that I was sure they'd never even heard of child psychiatry.

I still avoided closets.

In my third year of college, the nightmares returned. I began to dream about my closet – not my childhood closet, but the one in my room at my apartment – and the creatures, more grotesque than I remembered with their needle sharp teeth and long fingers that turned to claws at the ends. They had no eyes, just sunken, empty black holes. They smelled like rotting meat and trash. In my dream, I would smell them while laying in bed, then they would emerge from my closet – just two of them – and crawl across the floor to my bed, where they would drag their claws over my flesh before tearing into me and eating me alive.

I would wake up crying most nights, terrified and gasping for air between sobs, crying from the pain and the fear. Nick heard me a few times, and he always asked in the morning if I was all right. I told him that I would be fine, that I was just having nightmares from stressing over finals, and that all would be well in a few weeks.

Finals came and went. The nightmares continued with no regard for my thinly veiled excuse, and my roommate began to ask me questions again. I didn't know what to say.

I bought a padlock for my closet door.

I removed all of my clothes and put them into the dresser I had long been using for junk and the occasional t-shirt, and I locked my closet door.

For a few nights, the dreams stopped. Then they began again, only this time the closet that the creatures were crawling out of night after night was the coat closet in the front room. They would sniff me out and find their way back to my room, open the door with their clawed hands, and creep over to my bed.

I began to wake up screaming again. Nick, unsettled and concerned, began coming in to check on me whenever I woke from one of these nightmares. He never asked what I dreamed about, and I never told him. One night I told him I wanted to put a padlock on the coat closet. He must have heard the fear in my voice, because he reluctantly agreed and didn't ask why.

We mainly used the coat closet for boardgames and what little outdoor equipment we had – Nick had a snowboard and boots he hardly ever used, and I had a pair of tennis rackets – so I cleaned it out the next day. I padlocked it, and taped the key and the key to my closet to the inside of the vent in my room. I trusted Nick, but I didn't tell him where I put the keys. I was too afraid.

The dreams stopped.

Life continued on as normal, I went back to school and felt confident that I could now forget about the closets. I did, for a while.

I came home from a night class one evening to find the coat closet wide open, the lock nowhere to be seen. Immediately I stormed to Nick's room and accused him, but he assured me that the door had been open when he got home from work shortly before I had. He assumed I had opened it and forgotten about it as I left for class.

I went to my room. The lock had been removed from my closet, too. I checked my vent, and the keys were gone.

I didn't even bother to pack a bag. I just left, caught the next bus headed to my parent's home town, an eight hour ride away from those closets. By the time I arrived home, I was still shaking, but I told my parents there had been an accident on the freeway that the bus had narrowly avoided. They wrapped me in blankets, made me tea, and put me to bed in my old room.

I don't know what time it is now. I've been sitting here for hours, too afraid to fall asleep, but I don't know how long. The room is too dark to see anything, but there's a noise coming from the closet that sounds like claws scraping on old plaster walls.

Something smells like rotting meat.

I don't want to pretend anymore.


End file.
